Multitudes of poor boys in popular fiction rise to affluence by the practice of the commercial virtues.  To be self-made, the axiom tacitly runs, is to be well-made.  Time was in the United States when the true hero had to start his career, unaided, from some lonely farm, from some widow’s cottage, or from some city slum; and although, with the growth of luxury in the nation, readers have come to approve the heir who puts on overalls and works up in a few months from the bottom of the factory to the top, the standards of success are practically the same in all instances:  sleepless industry, restless scheming, resistless will, coupled with a changeless probity in the domestic excellences.  Nothing is more curious about the American business man of fiction than the sentimentality he displays in all matters of the heart.  He may hold as robustly as he likes to the doctrine that business is business and that business and sympathy will not mix, but when put to the test he must always soften under the pleadings of distress and be malleable to the desires of mother, sweetheart, wife, or daughter.  Even when a popular novelist sets out to be reflective—­say, for example, Winston Churchill—­he takes his hero up to the mountain of success and then conducts him down again to the valley of humiliation, made conscious that the love, after all, either of his family or of his society, is better than lucre.  Theodore Dreiser’s stubborn habit of presenting his rich men’s will to power without abatement or apology has helped to keep him steadily suspected.  The popular romancers have contrived to mingle passion for money and susceptibility to moralism somewhat upon the analogy of those lucky thaumaturgists who are able to eat their cake and have it too.

A similar mixture occurs in the politician of popular tradition.  He hardly ever rises to the dimensions of statesmanship, and indeed rarely belongs to the Federal government at all:  Washington has always been singularly neglected by the novelists.  The American politician of fiction is essentially a local personage, the boss of ward or village.  Customarily he holds no office himself but instead sits in some dusty den and dispenses injustice with an even hand.  Candidates fear his influence and either truckle to him or advance against him with the weapons of reform—­failing, as a rule, to accomplish anything.  Aldermen and legislators are his creatures.  His web is out in all directions:  he holds this man’s mortgage, knows that man’s guilty secret, discovers the other’s weakness and takes advantage of it.  He is cynically illiterate and contemptuous of the respectable classes.  If need be he can resort to outrageous violence to gain his ends.  And yet, though the reflective novelists have all condemned him for half a century, he sits fast in ordinary fiction, where he is tolerated with the amused fatalism which in actual American life has allowed his lease to run so long.  What justifies him is his success—­his countrymen love success for its own sake—­and his kind heart.  Like Robin Hood he levies upon the plethoric rich for the deserving poor; and he yields to the tender entreaties of the widow and the orphan with amiable gestures.